PhD student, Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Francesca López
Will is a PhD candidate whose scholarship focuses on the school experiences of queer youth, trans youth, and youth of color. He aims to understand how their school experiences racialize and gender them, and how educators work to create safe, welcoming, and inclusive schools.
Prior to attending graduate school, Will worked as a college access coach in Minnesota and as a high school counselor in Tennessee. This gave him firsthand experience of how noninclusive school environments affect children’s wellbeing. He also saw how educators and school districts wanted to create inclusive schools but felt constrained by the political climate. These observations contributed to his graduate research, which also explores how educators and schools navigate complex political climates in making their decisions to support or not support students.
Will came to UW–Madison in 2023 supported by a University Fellowship. In 2024, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation named him a Health Policy Research Scholar – a competitive and substantial award.
As someone who worked for a time between undergraduate study and graduate school, Will said the University Fellowship allowed him the space to reacclimate to being a full-time student and dig into his research. The fellowship was also a supporting factor in securing the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation fellowship.
“It gave me the space to think about what other funding opportunities there might be for me to pursue,” Will said. “For example, I had the time to really craft a strong application – essays and things like that – that, had I had a job or some other obligations that I had to fulfill, would have been very hard for me to craft as strong of an application as I did.”
The Health Policy Research Scholars fellowship now supports Will’s research that will ultimately empower school districts to better support students.
“I do hope that schools are transformed to spaces where students feel a deep sense of their own dignity and feel a deep sense of belonging to those places where they are intended to learn and grow and explore what interests them,” Will said. “They will hopefully learn different kinds of skills that can help them pursue whatever they might want to do in the future, and be democratically engaged people in society.”